by David Bell
Someone who could answer some questions.
I sent a text, received the reply I wanted, and drove off.
* * *
Heather Aubrey and I dated briefly during our first year of college, right before I met Marissa. We split up mutually, and then when Marissa and I started dating, we all remained friends. We traveled in the same larger social circle, and there were times—notably during a couple of summers—when Marissa and Heather were very close. A few months after Marissa died, Heather and I dated again for about a month. But the relationship quickly grew weird for me. It felt like I was cheating on Marissa, even though she was dead, and it seemed awkward to be with someone who knew Marissa so well. I broke it off, which didn’t make Heather happy, but I couldn’t do anything else.
Heather and I kept in touch sporadically over the years. We both settled in Eastland after college. Heather married, had kids, divorced. When Gina and I split up, Heather and I dated briefly again. Very briefly. She seemed to want to move quickly toward something permanent: a solid commitment if not engagement and marriage, which didn’t surprise me. Heather was practical, more practical than Marissa or I. Heather even told me once that Marissa and I had been dreamers with our heads in the clouds. Heather majored in business in college and worked briefly as a sales rep before getting married and having kids. She liked to set goals and move toward them, but her practicality masked a surprisingly emotional side. When those goals weren’t met, or even weren’t met quickly enough, Heather could become intensely unhappy.
When I sensed her desire for a stronger commitment from me during our postdivorce reunion and decided to break things off, she told me, forcefully, never to speak to her again. And for close to a year I didn’t. She’d issued the same threat when we broke up after Marissa’s death. Over time, she eased back into my life. An occasional text. A Facebook message. And then we were acting like there’d never been a problem between us.
So we’d been cool for a while lately and even got together for a platonic drink or coffee now and then. She lived in a newer subdivision with her two teenage children and seemed to work only when she felt like it. Her ex-husband had a lot of money—he was a dentist who had once given me a crown—and in the wake of their divorce, Heather focused as much of her energy as possible on raising her kids. She looked like an upper-middle-class suburban mom. Fit, tan, cheery.
The evening I saw the headline about Emily’s murder, Heather greeted me at her door with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and I won’t lie and say it didn’t feel good to have a woman in my arms again. Did anything feel better than that?
“Well, you look great, don’t you?” she said.
“Are you kidding?” I asked. “I’m tired, slightly hungover, and sliding into middle age. You’re just being nice.”
“I’m not,” she said, patting my cheek. “Have you seen what most men our age look like? You’ve got your hair. You’re trim.” She rubbed my upper arm. “You always were handsome.”
She led me into a bright, clean kitchen. I accepted her offer of a glass of water, and then we were sitting across from each other.
“The kids are off at soccer practice and chess club,” she said. “Do you still see Andrew? How old is he now?”
“I don’t see him as much as I’d like. And he’s nine.”
“That’s too bad.” Some of her cheer slipped, and she became a little guarded, cautious. It was always chancy opening communication with an ex. “I was pleasantly surprised when you texted today.”
“How long has it been since we’ve seen each other?” I asked. “A couple of weeks?”
“More than that. We said we’d be friends, but you’re not much of one.”
“I’m sorry about that. I work a lot. And I started playing in a basketball league.”
“Really? Basketball?”
“It’s an over-forty league. It keeps me active. We go out for beers after the games. There are some good guys in the group.” I wondered if I’d made a mistake calling her, but I wanted her opinion. She knew Marissa well. Very well. “I came over because I need your help with something.”
I held the afternoon paper folded under my arm. Heather nodded toward it.
“Did you get a paper route?” she asked.
“I wanted to show you something.”
“Is it something good?”
I unfolded the paper and placed it in front of her, smoothing out the centerfold so she could see Emily’s picture. I didn’t say anything or prompt her in any way.
Heather reached over and picked up a pair of reading glasses. She slipped them on and studied the paper.
“Mmmm,” she said, shaking her head. “I heard about this on the radio, but I haven’t seen a picture of the girl.” She scanned the story, still shaking her head. “This is awful. Her parents . . . My Amanda is sixteen, not much younger than this girl.”
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Is what it?”
“Is that your only reaction to the photo?”
Heather slipped her glasses off. “I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”
I tapped the paper. “Does that girl look familiar?”
Without looking back at the paper, Heather said, “I’ve never seen her before. And I don’t know her name. It says she’s from Lexington or someplace like that.”
“Doesn’t she look just like Marissa?” I asked.
Heather’s face changed even further. All the cheeriness left, slipping into a look I imagined she showed to her children when they begged for a pony or clung stubbornly to a belief in the Tooth Fairy. She pitied me. But she also humored me by putting the glasses back on and studying the picture one more time.
She heaved a sigh.
“Sure, I see a resemblance,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“A general resemblance. Lots of girls have red hair and . . . maybe she has brown eyes. It’s hard to tell in the paper. But lots of young girls are this pretty. Amanda brings her friends around, and I feel like Grandma Moses, they’re all so beautiful. It’s easy to feel a little intoxicated around them.”
“You didn’t see this girl like I did,” I said, tapping the paper. “I saw her gestures, her walk. I can’t believe you’re not seeing it in this photo.”
“Saw her where?” she asked.
“In the grocery store. Last night, right before she died.”
Heather slipped the glasses off again. She reached over and patted my hand.
“Oh, Nick. You never got over Marissa, did you? All these years later, you’re still chasing her ghost.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Heather poured more water for me, and then she sat down at the table again.
“I understand why you feel that way about Marissa. Even among a group of young people, she stood out,” she said. “Her energy. Her laugh. And she was kind, too. A good friend. She just had . . . something.” She sounded a little resentful when she said, “Hell, everybody loved Marissa.”
“And you two got pretty close,” I said, “especially during that summer you were both living in Eastland.”
Heather looked out the window at the backyard. The grass was slightly yellow, just starting to recover from the cold of winter. The trees were barren, leafless.
“She had closer friends than me, I suppose,” Heather said. “I kind of felt a rivalry with her. You know how girls are. Always trying to outdress or outshine the one right next to them.” Heather looked back over at me. “And she got you.”
“Were you angry about that?” I asked.
Her features sharpened. “My life worked out well. Pretty well.” She gestured into the air, perhaps indicating the house, the yard, her life. “I know Marissa hurt you right before she died.”
“What do you know about that?” I asked. “About why she broke up with me?”
A look of disb
elief crossed Heather’s face. “My God. You are on a ghost hunt. Did seeing this girl really send you this far into the past?”
“Yes, it has me thinking about all of that stuff. Chasing ghosts, as you say. I just want to understand, and I’ve never really talked about it with our college friends. Not since then. You and I didn’t even talk about it, and we started dating right after she died.”
“We were helping each other grieve,” she said. “It’s normal for friends to do that.”
“I suppose.”
“What do you want to know?” Heather asked, her voice a little colder.
The sun slipped away outside, the horizon slowly turning orange. The furnace clicked on and pushed warm air through the vents.
“Did she say anything to you about why she wanted to split up with me?” I asked. I really was chasing a ghost, one that had long ago fled from our lives.
“I thought she told you everything you needed to know.”
“She told me she was unworthy of me, and that I needed to be done with her,” I said. “Not just as a boyfriend, but also as a friend. She said she was thinking of withdrawing from school, which seemed crazy. She was a great student.”
“And she told a lot of us that her parents were having financial problems,” Heather said.
“Yeah, she kind of hinted at that.”
“She said they couldn’t afford to send her to Eastland anymore, so she had to say good-bye to her life here. You probably just got folded into that.” Her voice lowered. “And then . . . the fire . . .”
She stared straight ahead, her eyes a bit vacant. She must have been imagining the flames, the horror of the heat and smoke.
I gently asked another question. “Did you know her parents?”
“I met them a time or two when they came to visit. I didn’t know them well.”
“I did,” I said. “They weren’t the kind of people to have financial problems. Quite the opposite. They had a nice house, nice cars. They belonged to a country club.”
“Look at all those bankers and Wall Street guys who lived the high life, and then, beneath the surface, nothing.” Her hand fluttered in the air to punctuate her comment. “All built on lies. How do you know her dad wasn’t like that? Living beyond his means?”
“I guess I don’t really know,” I said.
“I always figured her dad got in too deep with something,” she said, “and Marissa would have to leave school and go back home to Hanfort for a while. Maybe work, save money, take classes at a community college, and then bounce back. She’d land on her feet. I believed that. She always did. Things didn’t get her down or derail her for too long. She had a brightness that never dimmed.”
“That’s just it, though,” I said. “When she broke up with me, she seemed so defeated. So down. It wasn’t like her.”
“How would you feel if you found out your parents weren’t what you thought they were? That would throw you for a loop, wouldn’t it? Make you reevaluate everything? Every relationship and event in your life?” Heather leaned closer to me, and up close I saw the gold flecks in her blue irises. “She was young, and she broke your heart. We’ve all been there. Besides, Marissa could be so . . . bold sometimes, you know? So tough and cut-and-dried when she needed to be. Sure, she was a dreamer, but she was a fearless dreamer. She knew her mind. She went for things if she wanted them. If it hadn’t been for . . .” Her voice trailed off. She bit down on her lower lip with her top teeth. “I don’t like to think about that fire. It’s too awful.”
“I know.”
I reached over and pulled the paper toward me. I studied the girl’s face again. Emily Russell’s face. Even if she was related to Marissa’s family, which it didn’t appear she was, then what did that matter to me? Marissa’s family had moved on with their lives long ago. I knew they moved away from Hanfort shortly after the funeral. I assumed it was just too painful to see all the places that reminded them of their daughter—playgrounds, schools, parks, friends. I couldn’t blame them.
But then why did the girl have my name and address in her pocket? What was I supposed to do with that?
I doubted Heather could tell me.
“It’s jealousy, too,” Heather said.
“What is?”
“These feelings you have now. The fact that you’re hung up on Marissa after all these years. She was just your college love, but you’re stuck on her because she rejected you for someone else.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “She didn’t have—”
“My husband cheated on me,” Heather said, her face growing somber. “A younger girl.” She forced a laugh, and it sounded thin and brittle. “I know I’ve told you about this. What a stupid cliché he was. Some twenty-year-old who worked in his office, probably couldn’t even walk and chew gum at the same time, the little brat. And he turned me into a cliché as well. The bitter, spurned middle-aged mom who is left taking care of the kids.”
“I’m sorry, Heather. But what are you talking about with Marissa? She didn’t have anyone else. She broke up with me, and then she died. That was it.”
Yes, it had been twenty years, but I still felt a tangled knot of jealousy swelling in my gut. It felt like a living thing, a rapidly growing organism.
“I thought you knew,” she said.
“Knew what?” I asked.
“Oh, Nick. I fear this is just going to rip you wide-open again—”
“What?”
“People saw her that night,” Heather said. “The night of the fire. She was in a bar. Razer’s? Remember that place? Out on Grant Street?”
“I thought that was a dive for locals.”
“It was. But some of us went there sometimes. They didn’t card, and we could get cheap drinks. And no college boys breathed on us there. The locals were actually pretty nice.” Heather swallowed hard and pursed her lips. “Look, Nick, Marissa was there the night of the fire. And she was with an older man.”
“Was it her dad?” I asked.
“Not her dad. And not a professor. They were having a real intimate conversation, like they were emotionally entangled with each other. Nick, we all thought she broke up with you because she was involved with this older man.”
“You saw her?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
I’d been kicked in the nuts once, during a high school soccer game, and Heather’s words hit me with the same force. A lung-emptying, heart-stabbing pain.
“She wouldn’t do that,” I said. “I would have known.”
“I guess people were protecting you after she died,” Heather said. “What point would there be to telling you about this man if Marissa was already gone? What did it matter at that point?”
“But she—”
I stopped myself. I remembered how Marissa had acted in the days leading up to the breakup and the fire. She was distant, cold. She wouldn’t talk to me or explain the sudden change in her mood. She always told me everything, but she’d suddenly gone silent. If she had been cheating on me, if her loyalties had been divided in some way, then isn’t that exactly how she would have acted? Wouldn’t she already have been pulling away and shutting me out?
“Don’t you think it’s better you know this now?” Heather asked. “Isn’t it better to know the truth about Marissa, even after all this time?”
“It doesn’t make me feel better,” I said.
“You will. Trust me. You can make a fresh start now.” She folded up the newspaper and handed it back to me. “You can stop seeing things that aren’t there.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gina didn’t answer my texts. She almost always did, even when things were bad between us, which they kind of were since she’d called the police on me. Then, when I got to her house—the house she and I used to share—no one answered the door.
I should have left.
Sometimes Andrew played in the backyard, and sometimes he went next door to hang out with the neighbors’ son. So I walked to the back of the house to look.
Andrew was nine and a great kid. He looked a lot like Gina. Dark hair, dark eyes. He was still small for his age, but I figured that would change soon enough. His father, Gina’s ex-boyfriend Phil, was tall, so the kid would eventually get some of that. Still, Andrew and I shared many interests. He liked sports of all kinds, and so did I. He was into monster movies, and he was curious about history. So was I. His father traveled a lot, so there was time for me to play the dad role while Gina and I were married. I’d always wanted to see him more often in the wake of the divorce, but Gina wasn’t ready to go along with that. She thought it would confuse Andrew, since Phil was back trying to play a larger role in his life. My brain told me she was right, at least in the short term. But I struggled to accept a logical argument when I cared so much about the kid.
The voices of children screaming and laughing reached me, and when I came to the back of the house, Andrew saw me.
“Nick!” he shouted.
“Hey, buddy,” I said as he came running over to me. He gave me half of a hug. He was young enough to think it was okay to hug his . . . whatever I was. Father figure? Kind of. Stepdad? Sure.
“Is your mom around?” I asked. The other kids in the yard, four of them, kept up their game. They chased one another in circles and occasionally somebody threw a football.
“She’s at the store.” Andrew pointed behind him. “Candace is watching me.”
“Who?”
I looked up. A teenage girl with long blond hair stood on the neighbors’ deck. I knew the neighbors, the Yarrows. They had a son Andrew’s age, and the two of them played together all the time. But I didn’t know Candace.
“Candace,” Andrew said. “She’s the new babysitter.”
I waved to her. “Hi. I’m Nick. I’m Andrew’s . . . stepdad. I know Steve and Linda Yarrow. I used to live here.”